


Hold Me In The Street

by DetectiveJoan



Category: Autoboyography - Christina Lauren
Genre: 5 Things, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon Gay Character, Coming Out, Developing Relationship, M/M, Mormonism, Post-Canon, Social Media, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 04:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14926940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: Five times photos of Sebastian Brother made their way onto social media.





	Hold Me In The Street

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "[Secret Love Song, Pt. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIwPhXaflow)" by Little Mix
> 
> Written for the prompt "coming out" from the [Trope_Writing_Prompts community](https://pillowfort.io/community/Trope_Writing_Prompts) on Pillowfort

Tanner silently thanks god that Sebastian had thought to rent a hotel room before coming to find him on campus. On the one hand, they’re two grown men and there’s no version of physics that would allow them both to fit on his comically skinny dorm bed — really, he swears they make those things extra small to discourage sleepovers — and on the other hand, Sebastian would probably have an actual heart attack if Tanner attempted to walk him into the lobby of the nearest motel with an arm wrapped around his shoulder, and ask for a room with one bed.

As it is, Seb chews the inside of his cheek when Tanner holds his hand for the short walk through the parking lot from his car to the hotel room, and he does a full-body exhale as soon as they get a solid, dead-locked door between them and the rest of the world.

“We’re in California,” Tanner reminds him.

“Yeah, I know,” Sebastian replies.

“No one cares that we’re together.”

“I know,” Sebastian says, but his voice still sounds kind of tight, so Tanner decides to drop the whole talking thing and instead focus on refamiliarizing himself with the sounds Sebastian makes when Tanner kisses him.

They spend a good five minutes making out by the door, and then another fifteen grinding on the bed, before Sebastian flops onto his back and complains that he hasn’t eaten since he left Utah.

“Let’s go get dinner,” he says.

“I wasn’t planning on leaving this room for about three days,” Tanner replies from where he’s straddling Seb’s thighs. It’s a good place to be. He could happily stay there for a _long_ time.

They compromise by ordering delivery from the Thai place Tanner’s RA introduced him to the first week of the semester. Tanner relocates to lie beside Sebastian so they can both see the menu on his phone. After they call in their order, he opens the camera app without thinking.

“Can we…?” he asks, waving his phone vaguely.

Sebastian is smiling, but there’s a tightness around his eyes.

“Just for you, right?” he says. “You wouldn’t put it on Facebook or anything?”

Tanner smudges a kiss against his collarbone. “Of course. You know I can be discreet.”

Sebastian _hmms._

“It’s one of your favorite things about me,” Tanner says, raising the phone with one hand and snapping a few shots without looking at the screen. He stretches up to kiss Sebastian’s neck, and feels his laugh there when Tanner continues, “right after my rakish good looks. And my irresistible charm. My way with words.”

Sebastian turns his head so his smile is buried in Tanner’s hair. “Rakish is a good word,” he agrees.

Tanner lets all of his social media go radio silent while Sebastian’s in town. The day after Seb gets on the plane back to Provo, though, he posts one of the shots from that first day.

It’s a damn artful photo, if he does say so himself. It’s filtered to black and white, and carefully cropped so you can’t see enough of Sebastian’s face to identify him, but you can still see the sharp cut of his jaw and an edge of the smile he couldn’t contain with Tanner’s lips pressed to his neck like that. They’re both shirtless, but the photo’s too desaturated to show the thin blonde hair on Sebastian’s chest. Seb’s friends would call the messy angles of Tanner’s hair “bed head” and Tanner’s friends would call it “sex hair”, and Tanner is perfectly happy with either connotation.

The caption is nothing but their emoji.

“Please tell me that means you climbed that boy like a mountain,” Auddy comments within thirty seconds.

 

ii. 

“Hey nerd answer the question,” Auddy messages him on Snapchat two days later, when he’s knee-deep in an essay he should’ve written a week ago. (It wasn’t _procrastination,_ okay, he was _distracted.)_ “I know that’s your seb emoji. are you or are you not finally boning the hottest creation on God’s Green Earth????”

He snaps Auddy the rest of the camera roll from Seb’s visit in reply. It had taken a lot of will power, but he’d managed to delete all but a dozen pictures of Sebastian. The unfiltered and uncropped version of the first one showed that they’d still had their pants on, and thus no actual sex had happened despite how good Seb looked in the rest of the photos, which all show the soft hair that covered his arms and chest, the smattering of freckles across his nose that Tanner could only see when they were close enough to kiss, and that stupid infectious smile that made it feel like all of Tanner’s insides were suddenly trying to be on his outside.

“If you share/save any of these I will personally drive three thousand miles across the country to murder you,” he types into the chat box after he sends them. “Seb will help.”

“Sounds like a romantic road trip,” she types back. “Also: maybe I shouldn’t be saying this seeing as he’s your boyfriend (or w/e) (again?) but every single one of these pics makes my brain feel like goo.”

 

iii.

Tanner had not been kidding about waving his bi flag high as soon as he left Provo — except that kids these days don’t really do physical flags too much anymore, and it’s not like there’s enough wall space to hang one up in his cramped dorm room anyways. He takes it to the internet instead. That first June, every social media website he has a profile on is decked in the electronic equivalent of head-to-toe rainbow stripes. There are bi pride color hearts in all of his bios, rainbow frames on his profile pics, and a half dozen cross-posted photos of his (frankly impressive) affirmative bumper sticker collection. He probably gets muted by a lot of kids from Provo, but he blocks the outright homophobes right back and it feel _fucking amazing._

After that, he gets kind of religious about alternating weeks of man crush mondays and woman crush wednesdays.

“You can’t possibly have a new crush every week,” his sister rolls her eyes at him over Skype after he’s kept it up for three months. “I mean, I’ve heard the shitty bi stereotypes, but no one’s thirst is that fickle.”

“It’s just an excuse to post photos of cute celebrities and remind people I’m bi,” he replies. “And please never use the word ‘thirst’ out loud again.”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

He’s pretty carefully avoided posting anyone he actually knows, but he decides to blow that when he realizes it’s been an entire year since Sebastian first kissed him. They haven’t seen each other in person since Tanner went home for Christmas and they’re...well, they’re not _not_ dating, a relationship status that doesn’t mean anything except that Tanner still isn’t allowed to flood his Facebook feed with an entire album of the photos they’ve taken together over the months.

(When Tanner had asked Sebastian if they were boyfriends again, Seb had just smirked impishly and said, “You wanna DTR? Wow, Tann, that’s really Utah County of you,” and Tanner had immediately decided to never bring it up again.)

Still, it would feel wrong not to mark the anniversary in some way.

Tanner hunts back through the files on his phone until he finds the publicity pictures of Sebastian he’d downloaded back when the crush was new. He posts the worst one: the photo Seb’s publisher took to print on the dust jacket of his first novel. It’s a little out of focus, small enough that it gets grainy when he blows it up for Instagram, and so obviously posed that it doesn’t manage to capture any of the magic that Seb naturally exudes at all times.

Tanner hovers over the caption box for a long time before finally typing, “In the memorable words of my bff: his smile makes me stupid <3 #MCM @sebastianbrother”

He gets a call from Sebastian two days later as he’s walking out of Starbucks.

“I got an email from…Instagram? That says something about you, uh, tagging me?” he says, sounding as confused as Tanner has ever heard him.

“Yeah, I posted you as my MCM,” he says. “Is that okay? Because I could move it to my finsta. Or private Twitter. Or, like, Facebook with really strict permissions.”

There’s a short pause. “Tanner, I don’t understand any of the words you just said. It’s fine.”

Tanner bites his straw and pulls it until it squeaks against the lid. “Okay. Then why are you calling?”

“It reminded me how much I hate that photo. My editor says we can replace it on my next book if I have something better, but I don’t have any photos of myself where I’m not wearing a tie. Please tell me any of the pictures you’ve taken of me are usable.”

“Uh,” Tanner says, trying not to think of the shirtless black and white one. “We could do a photoshoot next time you’re in California.”

 

iv.

Something Tanner discovers about himself very shortly after Sebastian leaves for his second book tour: he doesn’t handle loneliness very well.

Not that Seb being far away from him was new, of course. Seb still lives in Utah and Tanner still lives in California, and their relationship had been more Skype than anything else for long enough that the distance shouldn’t be too upsetting. Not to mention that the last time Seb had been on tour, Tanner hadn’t even been on speaking terms with him.

But for the singular, blessed week between the end of Tanner’s semester and the beginning of Sebastian’s tour, they had rented an Airbnb in Nevada and had spent seven entire days in each other’s company. It had been indescribably nice, and it had spoiled Tanner _completely._

Because now? Sebastian is several states and time zones away, spending most of his days on flights or doing readings at various bookstores, meeting hundreds of adoring fans and having fancy dinners with big shot publishers. Or something. Probably. Tanner doesn’t know, because the communication he has with his boyfriend is basically limited to short phone calls late at night, when Seb sounds dead on his feet and says he just wants to hear Tanner’s voice.

(They are boyfriends now. Again. Officially. Because after three months in therapy, Sebastian had sat Tanner down on his comically skinny dorm bed to reiterate how much he loved him and wanted him to continue being a part of his life, and to express how much he hoped Tanner would support him in his decision to come out after he finished his spring book tour.

“You’re such an idiot sometimes,” Tanner had said, because Sebastian’s serious tone had half convinced him that someone was dying of cancer or something. “Of course I fucking support you. Jesus. Oh hey, does that mean we get to, like, hold hands and shit in Utah?”

“In June,” Sebastian had promised. “But you still can’t swear like that in front of my family.”

“Deal.”)

Tanner would typically have no problem obliging Seb’s request for one-sided phone conversations, but there’s nothing going on in his life worth talking about — other than his renewed struggle to beat last spring’s manuscript into something worth publishing. It didn’t exactly make for scintillating discussion. On more than one occasion, Seb had actually fallen asleep in the middle of Tanner’s rant about how awful editing was.

It’s no one’s fault that Sebastian’s too tired to really connect with Tanner, but that doesn’t negate the fact that Tanner is lonely and antsy and (once he starts scrolling through his camera roll after midnight) stupidly nostalgic.

He makes it two and a half weeks before he cracks and decides he needs to put his feelings _somewhere,_ and if Seb can’t be his receptacle right now, well, at least the internet has never failed to be a receptive void.

The Facebook post he writes when he should definitely be asleep is a word-vomity mess of emotion retrospecting on the year and a half that he’s known Sebastian, how much he’s missed him during his tour, and how much their friendship — his fingers hesitate over the word, but they just have to pretend for a few more weeks — means to him.

“To put it in Mormon-speak,” he writes at the end, “I’ve been so blessed to have him become such an important part of my life over these past months, and I’m unspeakably proud of the man I’ve watched him grow into.”

He throws a #tbt tag on it, adds a joint selfie they’d taken the day that Sebastian had dragged him to the LA temple (blooming flowers surrounding them, the golden Moroni looming in the background), and goes to sleep.

Sebastian wakes him up with a phone call.

“Tann, I love you,” he says. “And I hate you. I read the essay you wrote about me on Facebook and now I’m crying in an airport and it’s your fault.”

Tanner pulls his pillow over his face. How had he forgotten he was dating someone with the internet acuity of a 60 year-old?

“It was 700 words long,” he says. “No one was supposed to _read_ it.”

Sebastian makes a defensive noise. “Oh,” he says, “well, I read it, and I shared it, and I think a bunch of my family read it too? My aunt said you seem like a really sweet young man.”

Tanner groans.

"I love you," Sebastian repeats, now with the intonation of an apology. 

 

v.

The day after Aunt Emily drags them all to Salt Lake Pride, Aunt Shivani posts a candid photo of Tanner and Sebastian on Twitter.

Tanner hadn’t even noticed she’d taken it — which is obvious in the picture. It shows him with his arms looped around Sebastian’s shoulders, and Seb’s arms wrapped around his waist, and they’re looking at each other like there’s no one else in the world. Missing the context of the slow music they’d been swaying to, the still-frame makes them look emphatically infatuated with each other.

Which they are.

It’s impossible to miss the context of their location, though. There are matching rainbow flags painted on their cheeks (Tanner’s smudged from his sweat in the June heat), Mormons Building Bridges stickers on their shirts, and a giant, slightly blurry Pride banner hanging in the background.

Sebastian silently examines the tweet on his phone for a long time. Bleary eyed, Tanner looks at it over his shoulder. It’s midmorning, but they’re still curled up in bed together, with no intention of leaving anytime soon.

“Well,” Tanner says eventually, the word pressed into Sebastian’s back because that’s where Tanner’s mouth happens to be.

“Yeah,” Seb agrees. “Here goes.”

And he hits retweet.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm Detectivejoan and you can find me on [tumblr](http://detectivejoan.tumblr.com/)


End file.
